Brett Marshall gave up his first run of the spring as his ERA jumped to 1.00. He has been strong so far. Neftali Soto continued his blazing start to the spring where he has 7 extra-base hits, just one strikeout and is hitting .438 in 32 at bats.

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13 Responses

Soto looked overmatched last year in limited ML action. What has changed; lesser pitching in spring, the aforementioned adjustments to his swing, he is just hot right now, or a basic combo of all of these things? I guess my real question is does anyone see him as a productive MLB player either here or anywhere else?

The $64,000 question, or in MLB more like the $64MM question. Obviously Heisey and Soto are NOT going to put up an OPS >1.2 during the season, but has something changed or happened to expect a stronger, more consistent performance from those 2 players or are their performances simply a spring training anomaly.

I still want to see him show more plate discipline over a few months before I change my mind that he is a backup with pop off of the bench. Crushing the ball in the spring is nice to see, but a few weeks doesn’t change years, for either Soto or Heisey really, of being big free swingers who struggle to get on base.

Didn’t Soto play winter ball? Sometimes those guys can hit the ground running a bit.

But on the other hand, perhaps his increased performance at 3rd last year may show he’s a late bloomer. It happens. Last few weeks of camp hopefully will ratchet up the competition, and give him a chance to keep it up.

Off topic. Doug, I am going out of town & wanted to sign up for your RSS feeds. But the orange RSS button at the top of the website doesn’t work. It takes you to a page that says “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it.” So, I am wondering if this is a glitch that you might be able to fix in the next few days or if you intentionally decided to stop offering RSS feeds? Thanks

I’m using Chrome. I just tried it again using IE & the same thing happened. I had no trouble doing this last Spring, so I thought maybe something had changed. I must admit I was using Firefox then, though, but this is the first time I have encountered anything that works in Firefox but not in Chrome or IE. Strange.

Ah, now I see the problem. Google Chrome does not come with an RSS Feed reader installed. Every other major browser does. That would explain it. If you are going to use Chrome, you will need to download an add on reader.

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